dbclient - banner too long?

Matt Johnston matt at ucc.asn.au
Tue Aug 24 19:11:47 WST 2010


On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 04:06:46PM -0400, Scott Sturdivant wrote:
> Using dropbear 0.50 (I know there's a more recent, but didn't see any  
> changelog notes about this issue), if I try to use dbclient to connect to 
> a host that has a long banner (1553 chars), I get the following error:
>
> dbclient: connection to user at host:22 exited: string too long
>
> On this particular host, I do not have access to change the banner.  
> However on a different machine that I do have access to, I did change its 
> banner and confirmed that indeed when using the longer one, dbclient 
> gives the 'string too long' error and aborts.
>
> Are there any workarounds for this?

A banner that size should work, there's a limit of 2000
characters but over that it just doesn't display the banner,
continuing as normal.  It seems like something else is going
wrong.  What SSH server is being used, and can I connect to
it via the internet (prior to authenticating)?  
"telnet servername 22" will print out the version string.

Cheers,
Matt


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